Necromunda The Sump: General hobby venting thread (Beware: old men shouting at clouds)

[Domino]

@Elita1 Don't go for the 'Hard Sell', just introduce them to NCE. You can download it from the vault. It takes the old rules, balances them up with a few rule changes and has years of player experience behind it.

I switched to it recently after being a fan of the ORB.

 

[Blood Donor]

My gripe? N17 sucks so bad across so many fronts that it had to get its own thread to complain about it, and now I wonder if the site staff should move all the other valid complaints about how bad it sucks from the various threads they are currently located in over to this one. That would be so much work! So many better things I could do on here. What a turdish rule set.

 

[Space Truckin]

There are not too many jobs where you can get something so horribly wrong and still collect a paycheck at the end day.

Really is no excuse.

If you were sold the game and it was missing a sprue...would you still accept it, an incomplete game?

 

[Domino]

There are not too many jobs where you can get something so horribly wrong and still collect a paycheck at the end day.

Really is no excuse.

I can think of quite a few, but I don't want to get political.

 

[Elita1]

@Domino Well this community already seems like far more competent games designers!

The plan atm is to just build a sweet table slowly, paint my initial gang and hope in a year the rules are looking coherent and there are lots of gangs for people to pick from.


Though it's looking more and more likely I'll be here cobbling together a system from community consensus on whether or not shock whips have soddin' versatile.

 

[Asgardleague]

Coming from simple clear rulesets (thank you Mantic) it’s not you. N17 is poorly written.

 

[Malo]

I don't know who the source for this is, so take it with salt, but it rings true...

Most of it is confirmed because James wrote up basically the same thing less detailed on his own website. Regarding the consulting to finish parts of it or even just to get clarification on many of the rules and what he intended, I assumed it was pretty much as written hence the clusterfuck of rules and the lack of any kind of FAQ. I just don't think anyone at GW really knows and they probably aren't allowed to spend a bunch of additional time and resources on it.

 

[Draco]

As profitable as GW is at the moment, I would think that they could spend a little more on quality. It would be interesting to see GW margin and sales forecasts for N17.

The core system is right, but splitting it up over multiple books is bad 4 business. I'll simply scratchbuild and go to a transcript before I buy garbage rules.

 

[MusingWarboss]

If you were sold the game and it was missing a sprue...would you still accept it, an incomplete game?

They couldn’t even be bothered to make two sprues per gang. Now you get two identical sets of leader kit in every box!! Woo.

 

[ntw3001]

A more specific not-quite-gripe: I have a small concern over a couple of things people seem to love. Both the cards (do people love those?) and the alternate activation sequence (people definitely like this) both seem very tacked-on to me. The action cards, especially, are very obviously something thrown in to give us another little thing to buy, and are in no way built into the system (aside from as an easy, unenthusisastic stab at a balancing mechanic). The ganger cards don't do anything a roster couldn't do (bar keeping track of loadouts, whicj is itself a poor rule that exists for no reason), and there's still a need to keep a roster in order to record the gang's information (which is very little and could have fit on a card itself). The alternate activation system is about s basic an implementation as it can be and I expect it to break down fairly badly if stress tested. IIRC it's possible to fit 17 armed members into a starting Escher gang; when Scavvies come out we'll see how well this system works. The reason I never included alternate activation into my own house rules is because I couldn't come up with a system robust enough to deal with scavvies and spyrers together, as well as having a discrete 'end of turn' stage to manage periodic effects. It also doesn't seem to handle more than 2 players that comfortably, which is a shame as it seems like a pretty common way to play Necromunda from the groups I've played with.

If I had time to design something, I'd probably marry the cards with the activation system using something 'inspired by' the game Havana. That is a good game with an ingenious system. Each player has a discrete set of numbered action cards, plays two, reveals them and arranges them into the lowest possible number (so if you play a 2 and a 6, you make 26). The lowest number goes first and takes the actions they chose. Once its all done, everyone replaces one of their cards with another, face-down card. It can't just slot in and would require the system to be fully built around it, but it's really really good.

 

[Thorgor]

@ntw3001 :

The ganger cards do one thing that a roster wouldn't do as well: they can be shuffled to draw a random crew. But that's it.

Tactic cards are not well thought out, I agree, but I believe we could make them work. First, they (as many other thing in the game) need a tad of balancing. Then their need to be rules for deck-building (and not some stupid "bring everything you own"), and they must always be drawn at random, never chosen by the players. And then, you need some rules to allow cards to be drawn and played during gameplay (from the top of my head, you could gain a token each time one of your fighters earn one experience point during game play, and spend it to either play a tactic card (cards could have different costs, including 0) or draw two cards from your deck)

And you are right that any alternate activation system can break when there is too much of a discrepancy in the number of fighters. There are many ways to mitigate that. To name just a few:

• cap the number of fighters each gang can have on their roster or in game at any given time
• force group activation on the weakest fighters (that's what Imperial Assault did with Stormtroopers and other mook squads)
• give passes to the player with the fewer fighter
• give several activations to the strongest fighters
• give a set number of activations to each gang, regardless of the number of fighters they have (a single fighter may or may not be activated twice, and if they can, some actions may be restricted to once or twice per turn) like in Shadespire
• give some alternative action to do (like drawing more tactic cards for instance) to the player with fewer fighters when they don't have any fighter left to activate

They kinda did the first thing and maybe they'll go the group activation/several activations per fighter route with scavvies and spyrers.

 

[The_Worker]

Alternative activation difference between lots of figures and a small number of figures is best handled by giving the smaller gang the option to pass their turn, surely?

On the other hand, use of Champs and Leaders and skills can see a whole gang moved in three activations or maybe four tops. So... I dunno.

I think I've not played this enough to really pick up all the issues with the rules. It's a shame that the lead designer's input isn't wanted any more and the result is low level chaos.

 

[Luke82]

My gaming group, most of us old enough to have loved necro first time round, never really got the campaign going again after a week off for chrimbo. I think once the new shiny syndrome wore off the alternate activation (which everyone liked) wasn't enough to counter the rest of the issues with the game and the inevitable death by a thousand cuts business model to get a half way decent game. It's going to be a worse buy in than a 40k army!


Speaking of which, I don't think I really took to this version as it felt like a little game of 40k. I liked the fact that everyone started rubbish in oldcrumunda. A successful lasgun hit felt like it meant something! Now there's all sorts of krak grenades flying around hitting on 3s, and Goliath leaders making 5 2+ attacks after a few games. It just feels wrong.

 

[The_Worker]

Speaking of which, I don't think I really took to this version as it felt like a little game of 40k. I liked the fact that everyone started rubbish in oldcrumunda. A successful lasgun hit felt like it meant something! Now there's all sorts of krak grenades flying around hitting on 3s, and Goliath leaders making 5 2+ attacks after a few games. It just feels wrong.

Heh. I dunno about that, we've always had ridiculous access to weapons that are clearly military-grade! My Eschers - the HellBitches - started out with a plasma pistol and two plasma guns! That was the Living Rulebook, back in 2007.

What I am disappointed about is the lack of rules for, and availability of, chainswords, the ubiquitous Imperial close combat weapon of choice!

 

[Luke82]

Heh. I dunno about that, we've always had ridiculous access to weapons that are clearly military-grade! My Eschers - the HellBitches - started out with a plasma pistol and two plasma guns! That was the Living Rulebook, back in 2007.

What I am disappointed about is the lack of rules for, and availability of, chainswords, the ubiquitous Imperial close combat weapon of choice!

I think it makes sense that on an industrial planet that manufactures billions of military weapons it's easy for criminals to get hold of them.... it's them then being so effective at using them that irks! I like the idea of some scrawny ganger blasting off rounds with a plasma gun without a single clue what he's doing ha ha.

 

[The_Worker]

I think it makes sense that on an industrial planet that manufactures billions of military weapons it's easy for criminals to get hold of them.... it's them then being so effective at using them that irks! I like the idea of some scrawny ganger blasting off rounds with a plasma gun without a single clue what he's doing ha ha.

The thing is that this version seems to be much more designed for short-burn campaigns lasting maybe 5-10 games, so you want to pack in the advances quickly. Then you have a break, and start a new gang with a new campaign, or maybe see if your old gang can take on all comers or whatnot.

 

[Bourhgen]

The old rules were only parted out between the original boxed set (Rulebook and Sourcebook) and the Outlanders expansion set. The base game came with rules for all six original gangs, full campaign rules, full trading post and rules for all gear and equipment, rules for hired guns -- the game could be played completely from this set without ever worrying about Outlanders. Outlanders added a few more gangs, rules for psykers, and other miscellaneous things that you could live without.

The release of the original Necromunda was nothing like the current release.

 

[Luke82]

Well our campaign was certainly short burn ha ha!

 

[ntw3001]

What we've done with the tactics cards is 'draw five, pick two'. That's worked very well; nobody wants to sit and read through almost ten thousand cards just to pick the four or so they'll ever use. With this rule there's no guarantee that, say, Unstoppable Behemoth will show up in every single game ever.

I honestly find it odd that that rule isn't in the rulebook; maybe it's because of other games I've played, but I initially assumed this was how the cards were intended to be used. I didn't think of not using it until I realised the rules seriously expected me to pick at will from a deck only slightly less tall than myself.

Re. Length of campaigns: It's hard to tell what the plan was supposed to be. On the money side, you get a lot. Your gang develops fast. On the experience side, the opposite is true. We're several games in and haven't yet had any advances. The way the post-battle sequence is divided seems to be completely arbitrary. Income is acquired after a game from working territories, but also an additional pittance is gained after the first game of each cycle with the exception of the first game of the first cycle of the turf war. Non-gangers purchase advances in the pre-game sequence, whereas gangers, on careful reading, appear to gain advances mid-game. Gangers are not promoted to champions, but instead adopt some rather obscure purgatory state where they are sort of like champions (let's not pretend skill access means anything; don't take skills), but can then become champions later for post-battle convenience, except they'll be a slightly different kind of champion with different max stats. Roll that up and put it in a flowchart.

 

[The_Worker]

What we've done with the tactics cards is 'draw five, pick two'.

Genius!

Perhaps "draw five in total; any mix from the Generic Pile and your Gang Pile, pick two"?