(Finished!) YCE Rulebook draft (Proofread,Discussion)
- Thread starter JawRippa
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I was thinking more about the reduced lethality with that comment than the micro details.
Between the greater benefits of full cover (in my games figures seem to be in full cover >50% of the time), the addition of the hard target status for moving twice, and the ubiquity of "pseudo parrying" in contested melee it seems significantly more difficult to hit targets.
I've never been a proponent of contested melee, because it seems to be trying to solve a non-existent problem. I sort of like the "you charge, you probably win" paradigm, because it allows non-specialist melee fighters to have a place in the game. Contested melee seems like it widens the gap between specialists and non-specialists and reinforces all-shooting or all-melee skew gangs.
It's interesting how for the first few years of the game's life the general consensus was that melee was ineffectual and a waste of time, but then a single gang (Corpse Huggers Club; although the House books carried on the trend of improving some melee fighters) seemed to change that and now some players are looking for ways to reduce lethality in melee.
I don't know @KA7777, but my escher player was using cc-focused leaders to chew through enemies long before Dark Uprising, and when ambots arrived in plastic, we found to be the "original" corpse hugger killer. I've not been a fan of the cc-delete path since our first campaign, as it just feels non-tactical - cc's tension always was the priority roll (especially if there was a cc fight ongoing) rather than the fight itself, as the results were usually guaranteed.
Giving a defender a chance doesn't make cc less effective, it just changes that tension from priority roll to the actual fight, which I think is a narrative win.
Even in our campaigns where we heavily nerf shooting (through additional to hit modifiers and other ideas @JawRippa seems to have developed from the place as some of my old old rules online in a book that shall remain nameless), ccw still felt like the least fun thing - it has the effect of emphasising shooting over cc, as it made players pick a shooty ganger rather than making it better to give shooty fighters cc defences, or go more for all-rounders and have strong cc fighters to counter other players' cc fighters (why gamble on a fighter who could die easily, when you could just buy another gun). Maybe that won't change, but this pushes players to considering how their best shooters also need to multitask now).
Does that make sense?
Giving a defender a chance doesn't make cc less effective, it just changes that tension from priority roll to the actual fight, which I think is a narrative win.
Even in our campaigns where we heavily nerf shooting (through additional to hit modifiers and other ideas @JawRippa seems to have developed from the place as some of my old old rules online in a book that shall remain nameless), ccw still felt like the least fun thing - it has the effect of emphasising shooting over cc, as it made players pick a shooty ganger rather than making it better to give shooty fighters cc defences, or go more for all-rounders and have strong cc fighters to counter other players' cc fighters (why gamble on a fighter who could die easily, when you could just buy another gun). Maybe that won't change, but this pushes players to considering how their best shooters also need to multitask now).
Does that make sense?
This is a fantastic result and perhaps the most important way forward (much more so than any official books the past couple of years).
I've left a lot of windows for mediocre fighters to chip at melee blenders. First, a 6 can only be parried with a 6 and secondly, you can't defend with more dice than your attacker has for attacking and -1WS penalty for defender also makes it easier for hits to go thorugh. The idea behind all these restrictions is that defending should reduce damage, not fully negate it.
Petitioner's City nails the problem, in GW rules focus is on priority roll, I want to make focus on figher's characteristics too.
Full cover benefits and 'hard target' are there to promote fighters to make use of the battlefield and move around. Hard target and Full cover do not stack specifically not to ruin gameplay of groups who play on busy boards like yours seems to do.
Can you expand on this? Or what the word "tactical" means to you? Because I have almost the exact opposite opinion.
"Charge-to-win" rewards tactical play. Tactical play consists of making *choices*. Moving through the board-space to find melee targets involves a LOT of weighted decision making. Examples include speed vs. concealment, how much you're willing to expose yourself to attempt a charge, the charge distance you are comfortable risking, target priority, predicting enemy movement and moving in directions/spaces early that will lead to the charges you want later, etc. All of this was made even more challenging by the game being slanted towards shooting than close combat.
Opposed melee doesn't add any choices; fights become governed by statlines and equipment. I suppose you still have to get to your fight location on the board, so it doesn't necessarily deprive you of the sorts of decisions listed above, but what exactly is it adding, in terms of "tactical" play?
More windows than they have now? Because, if they don't have more windows, and merely still have some windows, that's still a degradation of non-specialist melee fighters in comparison to where they currently sit.
I do agree that your ruleset makes up for some of the downsides of skimpy boards. But I also think that good boards are an ideal everyone should strive for, and that any ruleset should strive to optimize the play experiences on those, rather than optimizing for subpar conditions.
KA7777, you are a part of school of thought which thinks that interactive melee should work like shooting does, aka reliable and deadly once you get there, even at expense of defender's stats not mattering.
I'm of the opposite opinion, I want to give defender more power, even if it risks making charging less appealing and risky. I'm not saying that one opinion is better than the other, they both have positive and negative sides. However it is a waste of time for us to argue about what 'interactive' for melee is, because we have completely opposite veiews on the subject.
Also I'll quote myself from YCE Melee thread.
I'm of the opposite opinion, I want to give defender more power, even if it risks making charging less appealing and risky. I'm not saying that one opinion is better than the other, they both have positive and negative sides. However it is a waste of time for us to argue about what 'interactive' for melee is, because we have completely opposite veiews on the subject.
Also I'll quote myself from YCE Melee thread.
The defender's stats already matter; they have a toughness stat, and an armour save stat. And before combat was ever joined they had a movement stat, which helped govern whether they were ever in position to be charged at all.
You very, veeeery specifically want the WS and A stats to matter more, for whatever reason.
Versimilitude? This isn't chess. If two master duellists fight, I don't expect it to be a case of someone getting all their hits in before the other person - that's so utterly non-versimilitudinous and for me (and many others) deeply unsatisfying.
And by tactical I really mean JR's system which is more tactical than simply alternating actions or chess-like delete win.
instead you have to decide and go with either attack or defend dice, which is great. A bit rock-paper-scissors, neither of which are guaranteed. An actual tactical choice of risk.
Sounds great because it makes cc more exciting and blood-pumping.
It does need a situation where shooting is harder and/or more expensive; glad JR is going for the former.
It's not chess, but it's still a game -- extremely abstracted and not attempting anything approaching simulation. Verisimilitude arguments are often funny when you get to see the weird, niche fixations of their proponents exposed. Like, why are duellists important to you, but the fact that fighters politely take turns conducting their acts of aggression, or that someone can turn up to battle not knowing if they have one or three grenades are fine?
And that's putting aside the fact that fights in Necromunda are generally not duels. They're frantic bursts of violence that occur in a window of something like 5-10 seconds (based on the time it takes to complete an action).
Escher player, by any chance?
None of this accords with any accepted definition of the word tactics, so you ought to substitute another word. You're describing number-crunching with stable optimal results, not something tactical.
Even in a five to ten second fight, be it wrestling or fencing or MMA or just friends or foes punching, people don't launch ten attacks at their opponent before their opponent can react, @KA7777. But necromunda envisions these tooled up cc fighters somehow can do that, despite everything to the contrary, when facing someone their equivalent or even better.
Sadly I've not actually played Escher in modernmunda yet
mainly orlock and other non-optimised gangs who actually do need a little help in cc (as it pushes you to just ignore it and load up on cheaper, nastier, less risky ranged weapons), or when I've played a strong cc gang (venators), I've seen how frustrating cc is from the other side (your cc fighters disappear if you get a bad priority roll, your cc fighters win if you get a good one).
As for tactics, maybe so, but you get what I mean nevertheless - ensuring both players make decisions in cc that matter, rather than just one player rolling dice. Im not sure how the former (taking decisions to ensure the optimised result) isn't "tactics" as it is defined, but perhaps that is semantics
Anyway, clearly you feel passionately about this one way, others feel differently. An impasse. But why not try something differently rather than reject it out of hand? It might make it better, it might not - thats the best way to be sure of something, rather than be biased
Sadly I've not actually played Escher in modernmunda yet
mainly orlock and other non-optimised gangs who actually do need a little help in cc (as it pushes you to just ignore it and load up on cheaper, nastier, less risky ranged weapons), or when I've played a strong cc gang (venators), I've seen how frustrating cc is from the other side (your cc fighters disappear if you get a bad priority roll, your cc fighters win if you get a good one).As for tactics, maybe so, but you get what I mean nevertheless - ensuring both players make decisions in cc that matter, rather than just one player rolling dice. Im not sure how the former (taking decisions to ensure the optimised result) isn't "tactics" as it is defined, but perhaps that is semantics
Anyway, clearly you feel passionately about this one way, others feel differently. An impasse. But why not try something differently rather than reject it out of hand? It might make it better, it might not - thats the best way to be sure of something, rather than be biased
Based on the author`s notes and various YCE threads, aim was to make the Necromunda more accessible to new players and fix or streamline probelamtic rules. If @KA7777 don`t find those rules need changing, then I`d say you perhaps should stick to the original rules. There were plenty of threads regarding changes in YCE, and if that is the rules that were agreed upon by most, then I dare say it is better to leave it that way and move on.
The reason to split hairs over the phrasing is because a statement like "these rules are more tactical" is difficult to oppose (as long as it's true). Most of the time, and all else being equal, if one version of the rules is more tactical than another, then it's automatically better. What kind of madman would argue for less tactical opportunities?As for tactics, maybe so, but you get what I mean nevertheless - ensuring both players make decisions in cc that matter, rather than just one player rolling dice. Im not sure how the former (taking decisions to ensure the optimised result) isn't "tactics" as it is defined, but perhaps that is semantics
But I contend that the statement isn't true, and these rules aren't more "tactical" at all. They may still achieve something that some players prefer to the current rules. but it isn't an increase in available tactical choices/requirements. So concealing the actual objective of the new rules by describing them as achieving something beneficial that no sane person would argue against is an attitude I feel like pushing back against.
Well, these rules are packaged as a "community" effort intended to solve problems that the community agrees exist, but their actual purview goes well beyond that and rewrites the game to accommodate a set of highly-individual disagreements with the current game's design. Instead of restricting itself to the problems the community agrees about it does things like rebalancing close combat to favour powerful duellists over dirtbags with sharpened sticks.
I followed plenty of the YCE discussions and I'm not convinced that this document represents the averaged-out objectives of the participants; it may just be that JawRippa was the first person with the necessary skill who was willing to put in the labour to create a complete document, and therefore got to sneak in all their personal preferences.
I could be completely wrong about that, however. I didn't follow the development with enough rigour to state that firmly. But this ruleset absolutely wasn't compiled in a truly collaborative way if it came down to a single individual - deeply at risk of confirmation bias - reviewing all of the YCE discussions and then filtering them down to what they perceived as a representative document.
But regardless of how well the document reflects the YCE discussions, at the end of the day any member of the wider Necromunda-playing community that doesn't share those highly-individual concerns is incentivized to point out the flaws of the rewritten system in order to de-popularize it. The more widely it's embraced the more fractured the community might become.
No, you are correct. I did this document on my own, and I did bring my own takes on rules. However, I did not 'sneak' anything, in fact , I was actively seeking discussion with those of committee who were still interested in doing YCE, as well as posting on forum to ask general player's opinions. I actually ended up removing a lot of my ideas, even though I was very attached to most of them. You can check it for yourself from how this thread went, and its just a glimpse of cut and simplified content.
You have to accept that making a community version of Necromunda is going to inevitably leave a lot of fans dissatisfied, because you can't appeal to everyone. Unlike NCE, you can't just clarify things in modern Necromunda ruleset, because some things are really flawed from the get go and you can't expect bigger problems to go away on their own without alternating core game mechanics. When YCE committee was up we split our opinions roughly 50/50 about alternating attacks (or approach to give defender some way to protect themselves once getting into close combat is easier) and leaving things as they are. Again, schools of thought.
And before you think that 'community' should do it, first of all, community is not a writer who edits and proofreads heaps of text and secondly, community has extremely different opinions on any subject in the rules. What I'm trying to do is to find the golden middle where the least ammount of people will be pissed by the rules. I don't want to sound cynical, but I don't think that YCE is comming from anyone else simply because noone else is willing to take the job. I would be happy to be proven wrong, in fact I specifically left both original .doc as well as used fonts so anyone else can give it a try, or have a chance of continuing the project, should I lose interest.
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No, I think you're totally correct there, and I feel bad about criticizing your end results when your effort and formatting skills are so admirable.
It's also unrealistic to hold a fan-made ruleset to the ideal of collaboration achieved by an actual company. Nobody involved in fan-made rules is getting a paycheque for the time spent on them, and there's no way to cleanly settle disagreements (whereas a team of seven GW employees who are officially designated as the rules designers for a game could simply take a vote, and live by the results). Also, different voices are constantly popping in and out of YCE discussions, and nobody is approaching from the same starting point, whereas a unified team of designers would begin with a shared understanding of things like appropriate terrain coverage, the amount of fidelity they are trying to represent, the balance between shooting/melee or specialist/generalist fighters, etc.
But, nonetheless, I generally have a non-interventionist philosophy, and I think a community ruleset should be disciplined and limit itself to widespread problems (some of which you did cover in your version, so kudos for that).
In terms of other people doing similar to JR, I think on sharing my ruleset, I've been cautious because I don't want it taken down. I of course used to share my suggestions in a fairly public document, but when I stopped that, I decided to just focus on my own community, as it was less hassle and much more enjoyable.
I do hold a torch for returning to said document, but I think realistically my energies are on my Port Mad Dog group (not to be confused with a certain Facebook group), and making the best game for us. It's partly why I didn't take part in yce, despite being like @JawRippa a prodigious changer of the game; I was focused on the deep end of what we could achieve, but also was doing so in discussion with my group, who weren't taking part in the YCE discussions.
However one player asked if I can make our private group website a book again, as I used to do (first here and second here, having quickly realised a core book was better than a handbook by dint of being in one document), and thus I will spend some time doing that - and thus I'll probably share it publicly as a pdf again, not as a yce but certainly as a self-contained, comprehensive, small-c community version of Necromunda that anyone can choose to play (or rather magpie ideas from), as our fourth campaign ruleset went and changed so so much, and I am proud of what it has achieved. I might use your fonts @JawRippa - they are snazzy!
I do hold a torch for returning to said document, but I think realistically my energies are on my Port Mad Dog group (not to be confused with a certain Facebook group), and making the best game for us. It's partly why I didn't take part in yce, despite being like @JawRippa a prodigious changer of the game; I was focused on the deep end of what we could achieve, but also was doing so in discussion with my group, who weren't taking part in the YCE discussions.
However one player asked if I can make our private group website a book again, as I used to do (first here and second here, having quickly realised a core book was better than a handbook by dint of being in one document), and thus I will spend some time doing that - and thus I'll probably share it publicly as a pdf again, not as a yce but certainly as a self-contained, comprehensive, small-c community version of Necromunda that anyone can choose to play (or rather magpie ideas from), as our fourth campaign ruleset went and changed so so much, and I am proud of what it has achieved. I might use your fonts @JawRippa - they are snazzy!
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@Petitioner's City , I think that the most productive way to approach this is to have the same core ruleset at the base of any fanmade, YCE Main Rulebook. Then players would not have to relearn how the game works whenever they want to try another campaign for example. Basically I think that everything other than core rules should be a fair game for anyone to tweak. Core rules should be set in stone though.
I get what you want; I mean if i release P'sC-omunda, it won't be a YCE offshoot, per se - it will be 'here's what we do in our tiny campaign group, please feel free to pilfer, community' kind of eventual publication - it's too divergent from what you have done, or what SG does, because it was a grounds-up rewrite, as you will know from looking over the site (it goes further than even what @Killer Shrike did with his wonderful site and approach to Turf War-era N17). It's why I can't even imagine going back to a handbook style of 'here are the changes we did' - but also why the rulebook i'll recompose for my group over christmas can also be easily shared.
As far as I can tell, some of the people in the YCE discussions are mostly here and all seem positive to what @JawRippa has done (@TopsyKretts, @Commissariat, @Al_Weeks, @JayTee ). @Orngog hasn't posted in a long time alas, hope they are ok. @thanejaw and @Icedman haven't either in a bit, again hope they are ok.
I think you are the main person objecting to this, which is really important to do so and thank you - but I'm not sure in the best way - I guess it would be helpful to playtest it with friends (maybe do a mini campaign over a day with it) and see what happens? I do think @JawRippa has been very transparent, and public, in his discussions - his various threads are testament to that.
Of course it will be good to have @Thorgor and @MrAndersson and the other excellent rules lawyers on the site offer their thoughts,, although I'm not sure how involved they were in the YCE itself. Equally @Underhiverscr as one of the biggest voices of the necromunda podcasting community, and @Merton too as one of the most read commentators on N17, might be really helpful, adding weight to your own thoughts, or giving their own, them just being the all-around brilliant folk they are
if they'd like to, but I know they also might not too Any from just off conversations, there clearly is a hunger for this. Yes its a first draft, things will and should change. If it truly is a yce, that's important, but equally the NCE itself has always been the child of one editor working with their own biases (currently @Tiny), but also working through discussion and sharing, which, one must note, is exactly what @JawRippa has done, through very open discussion here on yak, his evident concession to group decisions and his already extensive playtesting?
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