N18 Enyoss' N20: or how I learned to stop complaining and tweaked N18

[enyoss]

Hey All,

So, I wanted to post up a labour of love I've been working on for a while. In short - a hybrid of N18 and some of the most beloved elements of NCE, e.g. proper gang advancement (which assists proper RPG character development), reined in rare trade, and a splash of map-based strategy to spice up the campaign rackets game.

And you know what? Against all the odds it seems to have been reasonably successful. Members of our gaming group who tried and failed to get into N18 are coming back into the fold, and the best thing is that the vast majority of N18 in-game mechanics are untouched. It's primarily the post-game and one-off gang creation elements which do the heavy lifting.

I'll start by plagiarizing myself from this thread here and focus on what I, and many of my group, have found to be the worst elements of N18. I'm reposting here as although that thread is campaign specific, I'm really interested in chucking these rules (and my rationale for them) out to the wider community, not just our LAGGNOG campaigns.

1. Variety, what variety? In a system with more actual stats and rare weapons than ever before, isn't it kind of strange we always see the same builds? Pairs of goliath champions doing everything, Nerves of Steel, True Grit, movement & weaponskill, wrecking the field. Yawn.
2. Rare Trade in the old days was like Christmas as a kid. You loved what you got, but always missed what you didn't. And you always dreamed of the day you could get everything you wanted for Christmas. Now I'm a jaded grown up and I can generally afford the stuff I want for Christmas (unless it's N18 Underdog cards). And it sucks.

In short - champions and leaders are too powerful, their advancement is depressingly predictable, gangers and juves are playing pieces, and powerful rare items are common as muck.

The game is now designed in the format of 40k and WHFB: variety is purchased at the outset, not developed organically. Isn't that a pity?

So here is the rock on which I build my church.

First off let's level the playing field a bit at gang creation, add some variety into starting champs and leaders, and then make advances more common but less predictable for everyone. Oh, and gangers can have skills...

Next up was Rare Trade. The desire here was to make rare items less predictable, and to create a trade off between gathering income and racket boons, and getting the kit you want:

Another nice touch, in my humble opinion, is that this actually works pretty well with the existing Yaktribe tools. I simply set up Custom profiles for Leaders, Champs and Gangers for each of the gangs, using the standard ganger profile and cost as a base, and shared these with the campaign. Players could then just hire them in, level up with Leaders and Champs on creation, et voila, done. There's no other effort required apart from putting the XP cost as zero when adding advances (as XP is accrued not spent) - even the advance costs are the same.

So anyway, I've attached the full PDF with all the details. It's 11 pages but don't be daunted - there's 6 pages of tables and diagrams, 1 page for the summary and 1 for the mapped campaign system. Bulk of the changes fit on 3-4 pages. I'll be updating as we find gaps, both gaping and small, but this is my offering to those who want a bit more old spice in their games with all the advantages of the new system

 

[JawRippa]

Some decisions I like, while others seem flawed.

• In general randomisation is healthier for the game, on the other hand, BS advancement is one of the most common outcome when rolling on this table, so quite quickly you'll have fighters shooting each other on 2+.
• Blast not being able to become better than 3+ could tone down all blast shenanigans, but not by much. You still pretty much never miss on scatter of big blasts. Also blast and ductway interraction is cute.
• I really, really dig motivating players to roll for secondary skills by rewarding them with mental stats. This is both flavorful and original.
• Less results on Injury table that makes gangers lose games is always welcome. It is never fun to have a situation when after an unlucky scrap you have almost noone to fight with. I'd push it even further by making fighters only miss next game when they got critically injured - getting stat decrease is punishing enough by itself.
• Banning History of violence and Dangerous footing is a decision that any arbitrator shoud make. Why ban deathtrap though? It is mediocre and situational tactic.
• How do you determine who chooses unclaimed territory first? What if there is an obvious go-for and more than 2 players want it? Could you describe how your group plays it step by step.

 

[Paroni]

Funnily enough a lot of your changes move Necromunda towards old school Mordheim.
In Mordheim, all advances are random. That's both a positive and a negative: some warbands get lucky and roll just the right advances (BS on their shooters, attacks on their melee guys) and top that off with nice skills. Others get unlucky and end up with leadership on their shooters and endless WS and BS on their melee guys.

In my opinion the way Necromunda handles leader and champion advances is way superior to Mordheim, as a single BS 5 Quick Shot Trick Shooter Crossbow user can really wreak havoc on teams with less luck.

One change I've been considering is just limiting each skill to 1 per gang. Having an agreement that no two models (or henchman groups) may be equipped exactly the same is also a nice way to create variety.

I feel like randomizing rare items would have the opposite effect of what you're looking to achieve. Instead of creating variety, it creates less variety as people will be stuck with their gang starting gear.

 

[JawRippa]

I feel like randomizing rare items would have the opposite effect of what you're looking to achieve. Instead of creating variety, it creates less variety as people will be stuck with their gang starting gear.

Yeah, I feel the same way. Also it puts Van Saars over the edge, since they have a lot of tasty HWL options.

 

[Paroni]

Yeah, I feel the same way. Also it puts Van Saars over the edge, since they have a lot of tasty HWL options.

That 75 credit combi Las/Plasma is so good it's just super hard to justify taking anything else.

 

[enyoss]

Some decisions I like, while others seem flawed.

• In general randomisation is healthier for the game, on the other hand, BS advancement is one of the most common outcome when rolling on this table, so quite quickly you'll have fighters shooting each other on 2+.
• Blast not being able to become better than 3+ could tone down all blast shenanigans, but not by much. You still pretty much never miss on scatter of big blasts. Also blast and ductway interraction is cute.
• I really, really dig motivating players to roll for secondary skills by rewarding them with mental stats. This is both flavorful and original.
• Less results on Injury table that makes gangers lose games is always welcome. It is never fun to have a situation when after an unlucky scrap you have almost noone to fight with. I'd push it even further by making fighters only miss next game when they got critically injured - getting stat decrease is punishing enough by itself.
• Banning History of violence and Dangerous footing is a decision that any arbitrator shoud make. Why ban deathtrap though? It is mediocre and situational tactic.
• How do you determine who chooses unclaimed territory first? What if there is an obvious go-for and more than 2 players want it? Could you describe how your group plays it step by step.

Good points raised here, and luckily all ones which were considered when I was putting it together .

1) BS advancement is the most common on the table, but it's still not common. The chance of wanting BS on an advance roll and getting it is 11%. That's compared with NCE where the probability of getting BS on any advance was 13%.

I essentially calibrated all the probabilities in this table to NCE, with a couple of exceptions. The first is for BS/WS where I wanted a lower chance of getting them due to the relative increase in their efficacy in N18 vs NCE - there are more multi-damage guns, and WS increases now scale linearly with both to-hit and Attacks (as discussed here for NCE - feels like a million years ago since I did that!).

And in our campaign, players are actually finding BS advances to be sought after treasures, so the experiments are reflecting the theory.

2) You're totally right about blast. I suggested this rule and got significant pushback from my gaming group. So I went away and did the maths, and with a 2+ to-hit and Blast (3") you end up hitting 87% of the time compared to base BS to-hit of 83%, with 3+ to-hit it's still 72% compared to a base BS to-hit of 67%. Gets even higher if you're playing ZM where walls stop scatter.

If you do more maths and consider groups of fighers, with to-hit roll of 3+ and Blast (5"), under the right circumstances you can get up to 95% chance of hitting someone...




Anyway, you're right, capping to-hit at 3+ for blast is doesn't solve all the problems, but it's a step in the right direction. There wasn't really the appetite to penalise Blast any further without trying things out in the campaign, and so far we've seen a reasonable reduction in blast weapons so the job seems to be a good one.

3) We're seeing loads of people taking Random Skill now (admittedly in our V0.4 version of these rules where you could take Ld+Cl or WP+Int for free, not just one stat) - that was because Psych stats weren't on the advance table at all though, the 8 slot was taken by more Movement and Initiative (which led to some pretty impressive Movement stats!). So yeah, it's doing the job for adding in variety! Now champs and leaders don't start with great psych stats either, stuff like WP and Int become a little more desirable.

4) Agree on injuries. Again though, this rule change was calibrated to the Grievous Injury result in NCE, which seemed to work quite well.

5) Agree on Deathtrap, but the reason is more for convenience than balance. Getting trapped in doors was removed as a rule in the compilation. So rather than add more rules (which I wanted to avoid, however ironic that sounds) I simply removed the card.

6) In practice during the Expansion phase two players will meet up, randomise challenger, and then the challenger picks which racket they play for. When results are mailed in to me as arbitrator I update our racket list, and in the unlikely scenario that two groups of players chose to challenge for the same unclaimed racket I assign it to whoever played first. If they were playing at the same time it's a roll off. The challenger who didn't get it can then pick another unclaimed racket instead. If you have issues with integrity there, i.e. a losing challenger picking garbage retrospectively, you can just let the winner pick .

Hope that answers some of those points. Happy to hear any more you might have though!

 

[enyoss]

That 75 credit combi Las/Plasma is so good it's just super hard to justify taking anything else.

Agreed - that weapon is silly when you consider Las weaponry suffers least from going Combi. The bolter melta suffers much more from Combi (reload that Bolter on a double 6!) and is costed much more punitatively.

Still, I wanted to mess around with HWL as little as possible aside from removing all gunsights and suspensors from all lists, which has worked really well.

Oddly, the change I've made which most impacts how our Van Saar are playing is improving their bodyglove save to 5+, but preventing it being combined with armoured undersuits. That and stopping leaders and champs getting BS2+ out of the gates.

 

[Paroni]

Agreed - that weapon is silly when you consider Las weaponry suffers least from going Combi. The bolter melta suffers much more from Combi (reload that Bolter on a double 6!) and is costed much more punitatively.

Still, I wanted to mess around with HWL as little as possible aside from removing all gunsights and suspensors from all lists, which has worked really well.

Oddly, the change I've made which most impacts how our Van Saar are playing is improving their bodyglove save to 5+, but preventing it being combined with armoured undersuits. That and stopping leaders and champs getting BS2+ out of the gates.

Bodygloves already can't be combined with armoured undersuits. I think you mean mesh armor or some other kind of armor?

I'm not sure why you'd want to force other playstyles on Van Saar, unless your group just loads up on LasPlas and Fast Shot.

 

[enyoss]

Funnily enough a lot of your changes move Necromunda towards old school Mordheim.
In Mordheim, all advances are random. That's both a positive and a negative: some warbands get lucky and roll just the right advances (BS on their shooters, attacks on their melee guys) and top that off with nice skills. Others get unlucky and end up with leadership on their shooters and endless WS and BS on their melee guys.

In my opinion the way Necromunda handles leader and champion advances is way superior to Mordheim, as a single BS 5 Quick Shot Trick Shooter Crossbow user can really wreak havoc on teams with less luck.

One change I've been considering is just limiting each skill to 1 per gang. Having an agreement that no two models (or henchman groups) may be equipped exactly the same is also a nice way to create variety.

I feel like randomizing rare items would have the opposite effect of what you're looking to achieve. Instead of creating variety, it creates less variety as people will be stuck with their gang starting gear.

Ah yes, I'm well aware of the draw backs of relying on Lady Luck to add some balance.

See my trials and tribulations in NCE, where I chart the progress (or lack of BS/WS upgrades) here and here, . That was a fun campaign .

This might be a disconnect in how we view the game experience though. Although it can be frustrating when you end up with WS in what you had hoped would be a shooty gang, it does force players to adapt. And that adaptation in the face of adversity is what leads to variety, and characters not cookie cutters.

For me that is one of the worst offences in N18 - I can predict exactly what advances a Van Saar champion will have, and how the gang will play, because it's pre-ordained. No Van Saar player has to sit down and think: "Mmm, lots of WS and Movement advances here - maybe it's time to pivot how I'm playing this rather than trying and failing with the standard build".

In the campaign in my links above there was one player who got about a dozen BS and WS advances, while I had none. It made for hard games. But it also made me go away and think of how to make the most of my crappy Initiative and Leadership advances (see here), and which scenarios I could pick which would give me the upper hand (see this little writeup).

Overall though, the sheer number of advances you get means it evens out over all the gangs. And if it doesn't, like my gang narrative above, use it to try stuff you've never done before .

 

[enyoss]

Bodygloves already can't be combined with armoured undersuits. I think you mean mesh armor or some other kind of armor?

I'm not sure why you'd want to force other playstyles on Van Saar, unless your group just loads up on LasPlas and Fast Shot.

Sorry, you're right - can't be combined with other armour.

Pfft, which guy put all these rules together? There's too many to remember

Regarding other playstyles for Van Saar, I think my group have just found their playstyle to be very frustrating. The only drawback is that they're "fragile" and "not very good in combat", but after game one they're all toting 4+ armour saves, several with 2+ armour saves in combat, which is just plain annoying.

But encouraging different play styles is the point really. At no point is a Van Saar gang going to put down all their guns and go combat focused - they still have BS3+ - but they might start to go 75/25 which is much more interesting than having them 95/5 in every game you'll ever see.

 

[JawRippa]

You could fix blasts by returning to NCE rule - in order to hit a model with a blast you have to cover it entirely, otherwise it hits on 4+. Makes blast shenanigans really hard to pull off. Although you'd have to houserule that any 40mm+ model is always hit by blasts, otherwise ambot can become almost impossible to hit reliably with grenades.

 

[MrAndersson]

Yeah, I feel the same way. Also it puts Van Saars over the edge, since they have a lot of tasty HWL options.

That 75 credit combi Las/Plasma is so good it's just super hard to justify taking anything else.

What are you guys talking about? There are two (non heavy) weapons in the game that stand head and and shoulders above the pack, and that's Boltgun and Grenade launcher. Lasgun/plasma is a very good weapon, but decidedly in the tier below them. The gang with the best HWL is Goliath, no question about it.

Van Saar's ballistic skill is another matter, though. And that advantage only gets bigger when you introduce random advancements.

 

[MrAndersson]

There is a much easier way to solve Blast. Just add the following:
- When putting down a blast, there must be at least one enemy fighter visible to the shooter under the marker.
- When rolling to hit, do so as if trying to hit one of the enemy fighters (your choice) under the blast, taking cover and other modifiers into account.
- Smoke ignores the above points.

This doesn't do anything for the slightly elevated chance of hitting that blast has, compared to other weapons. But it makes it so you can't cheat cover with it, which IMO is what makes blast unfun.

 

[enyoss]

What are you guys talking about? There are two (non heavy) weapons in the game that stand head and and shoulders above the pack, and that's Boltgun and Grenade launcher. Lasgun/plasma is a very good weapon, but decidedly in the tier below them. The gang with the best HWL is Goliath, no question about it.

Van Saar's ballistic skill is another matter, though. And that advantage only gets bigger when you introduce random advancements.

I've found bolters to be terrifying early campaign, but I also find their efficacy drops off significantly once people start getting Toughness advances. Against Goliath it's a 50:50 on the to-wound roll out of the gate. Also, the +2 to-hit at close range for las-plasma is punishing, so I'd still argue that las-plas is at least as good.

I do agree that really the Van Saar BS advance is one of the problems. I'm not sure that deterministic advances on leaders and champs really solves this - the only way other gangs can wholesale match up on BS is through advancing their gangers, and that's already random in the existing rules. The approach I've outlined above takes this existing situation but then effectively reduces the BS of Van Saar champs and leader (they can't get any BS advances at creation but all other gangs can, so no more starting BS 2+). You will get some champs who don't get a starting BS advance, but it's still a more level playing field for sure.

I think there will always be debate about deterministic vs random advances though.

A good analogue is the new Xcom. When I played I chose my advances, and ended up with essentially 8 or so distinct soldiers - 2 builds for half the classes, and the 1 decent one for the others. And it was like that for every playthrough.

Then I turned on training roulette and it blew the previous experience out of the water. Now I had 12 or more soldiers, each different to the last and generally unique on each playthrough, forcing me to play the game in new ways. Soldier A died? Well tough, no replacement Solider A. Gotta use Soliders B and C to cover what he could do alone, but you know what, Solider D works well with them, who'd have thought he would come in handy?

However, some people simply hated Training Roulette. They wanted to play with predetermined builds, and when Solider A died they wanted Soldier A to replace them. And that's fair enough to be honest - different strokes for different folks, right?

In my gaming groups though, for Necromunda I've always found that random advances breeds creativity, which I generally find is better for the game than reliability. Just my view though!

 

[enyoss]

There is a much easier way to solve Blast. Just add the following:
- When putting down a blast, there must be at least one enemy fighter visible to the shooter under the marker.
- When rolling to hit, do so as if trying to hit one of the enemy fighters (your choice) under the blast, taking cover and other modifiers into account.
- Smoke ignores the above points.

This doesn't do anything for the slightly elevated chance of hitting that blast has, compared to other weapons. But it makes it so you can't cheat cover with it, which IMO is what makes blast unfun.

Yeah, I've often thought that blast could be fixed by simply treating it like any other shot - target a fighter. I guess your fix above goes one step further and tries to preserve some of the fluffy parts of it, namely targeting points rather than fighters.

But definitely decent suggestions. I'm now wondering why we didn't do that... I reckon it was that group pushback I was talking about.

Probably from the Van Saar players.

 

[spafe]

But definitely decent suggestions. I'm now wondering why we didn't do that... I reckon it was that group pushback I was talking about.

Probably from the Van Saar players.

Gamie

 

[MrAndersson]

I think there will always be debate about deterministic vs random advances though.

I agree.

But if balance is your primary goal, deterministic is the way to go. If you have other goals, then random might be better.

I do agree that really the Van Saar BS advance is one of the problems. I'm not sure that deterministic advances on leaders and champs really solves this - the only way other gangs can wholesale match up on BS is through advancing their gangers, and that's already random in the existing rules.

Let's put it this way. A random system will always benefit the one with the stronger starting stats, since it makes it harder for the others to catch up.

My suggestion would be to:
- Make ganger advancements like everyone else's
- Lower the starting BS of Van Saar (and Venator) leaders and champions to 3+.
- Introduce an extra cost (in XP and in GR increase) for improving one's BS from 3+ to 2+.

That would give other gangs a fighting chance to catch up. Van Saar and Venators will still enjoy an early game advantage of higher BS on their gangers, but they won't be able to get to 2+ as quickly.

In my gaming groups though, for Necromunda I've always found that random advances breeds creativity, which I generally find is better for the game than reliability.

Creativity would be one of the "other goals", I hinted at above. If it is more important to you than balance, then having random advancements would be a good thing.

A good analogue is the new Xcom. When I played I chose my advances, and ended up with essentially 8 or so distinct soldiers - 2 builds for half the classes, and the 1 decent one for the others. And it was like that for every playthrough.

Then I turned on training roulette and it blew the previous experience out of the water. Now I had 12 or more soldiers, each different to the last and generally unique on each playthrough, forcing me to play the game in new ways. Soldier A died? Well tough, no replacement Solider A. Gotta use Soliders B and C to cover what he could do alone, but you know what, Solider D works well with them, who'd have thought he would come in handy?

However, some people simply hated Training Roulette. They wanted to play with predetermined builds, and when Solider A died they wanted Soldier A to replace them. And that's fair enough to be honest - different strokes for different folks, right?

I understand what you are saying, but there is one significant difference. In Necromunda, you are exclusively playing against human opponents. So balance is (or should be, at least in my opinion) a major concern. When you are playing against an AI, it's not nearly as important.

 

[enyoss]

Yeah, I agree - players can't be trusted not to take the path of least resistance to victory . Most players end up falling into the optimal minima (i.e. gutter) for their house. Power charge to the bottom. But some of those optimal builds are simply better than others - so no real balance anyway.

This is exactly why I like randomization here, as it shakes the fighters around a bit such that the optimal build given the advances you've got is less certain to be inferior or superior to others in the campaign. And what's inferior now might become quite good with the next advance.

Years ago I did work on neural networks, and that's how I see the Necromunda character development landscape. At the moment each champion starts like a marble on a slope next to an optimal build (a well, if you will), and eventually they just fall into that well.

But there are loads and loads of other little wells all over the place. You just never experience them as, given your starting point, why the hell would you? - you'll just drop into the well where you started. And if you start in a crappy well - tough.

But if you then shake the marbles up with randomized advances that puts each into a slightly different well (seem to remember that's called Boltzmann shaking in NN theory - at least it was 20 years ago!). If you get to pick your next advance, you'll slide down the slope of your local well and into a locally-optimal build. Same goes for your load out. But every once in a while you'll jump to a completely different well.

Eventually you are probably going to end up in one of the highly optimal wells we saw before, as after several advances even getting non-optimal advances won't be enough to push you away from the great build-path you're already on. But in the process you have explored all those other locally-optimal builds which the game has to offer.

In my eyes, balance here comes from the fact that at any point anybody can be in any one of those local wells, seeking out their locally optimal build with what they have. But at any point in the future they could be in a slightly different one. Player agency and steer comes from the fact that given the well you're in right now, you have choices in how you track to the optimal bottom of that well, and how you herd all those little sub-wells across your gang to form some kind of coherent winning strategy.

 

[enyoss]

On another note actually, there is one other thing to balance higher starting stats - cost, and therefore number of fighters. We've noticed a lot that number of activations has a big influence in the game. Partly why I dislike the Guild parties so much actually - so many activations!

 

[JawRippa]

On another note actually, there is one other thing to balance higher starting stats - cost, and therefore number of fighters. We've noticed a lot that number of activations has a big influence in the game. Partly why I dislike the Guild parties so much actually - so many activations!

I think putting a limit of 15 models on board at any given time is kinda needed. Otherwise game becomes very slow in my experience. In scenarios that allow your gang to be deployed allow reinforcements, but always having 15 or less fighters on the board.