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I have around 80 or so painted up non-infantry models (Gears, striders, vehicles) with another dozen blisters still unassembled in the current Blitz scale and another 20-25ish RAFM in various states from assembled to NIB. I'm not really sure how much of that is usable in the current rules (whether technically allowed or worth fielding).

I love that black and red color scheme warboss - that looks really great!

Non-KS I think I have around 50 gears, mostly from E-bay purchases.

With KS, not including the two that haven't delivered yet/still ongoing, well, I got two sets of the four armies.

Of those I have a UMFA half painted, and a SRA and MILITIA half painted. But I left them in a storage container back in New England when I got my current job, so they're out of reach at the moment.

Baconradar on the DP9 forums just posted his fan rules for blitz if anyone is interested.

Thanks for the heads up. Unfortunately, I've been out of practice with the HG ruleset since it was a beta with just reading the rules (and alpha when last actually playtested) so I frankly can't comment with any shred of authority on whether the changes are for the better or even needed.

 Mmmpi wrote:
Baconradar on the DP9 forums just posted his fan rules for blitz if anyone is interested.

It's interesting how they changed the skill roll. They exacerbated Shil's innate stasis by making skill contribute a simple +1D6. That's effectively useless once you're rolling 3D or more already. I wonder if they intentionally made the dice contribute less?

I doubt it as most people don't approach HG like you did. I think most folks go with "common wisdom" and don't actually crunch the numbers. Hell, I was one of them until I worked on my own house rules for oldblitz and manually calculated the odds of killing certain gears with certain weapons; the results were quite eye opening. Someone posted a brute force .exe calculator for nublitz years ago on the forum and I used it during the (alpha? beta?) stage to point out how certain weapons that were supposed to be doing a particular role (like anti-armor) were actually worse than those supposedly specializing in other things. I admit I haven't been following their blog too closely so can't say for certain though.

Are you referring to the part where when you roll, take the highest, and then add 1 for every die of the same number?

Because that seemed weird to me.

 Mmmpi wrote:
Are you referring to the part where when you roll, take the highest, and then add 1 for every die of the same number?

Because that seemed weird to me.

He is likely referring to this:

Probably the most obvious change to actual gameplay is to how Skill works: instead of
setting the target number on each dice, having better Skill than one’s opponent now gives a
bonus D6. There were various reasons behind this change, with the foremost being that we
wanted Skill to almost always be relevant in the outcome of an Attack. In the LRB the skill
rating of a model rarely made a significant difference, was completely irrelevant for the quite
common 1D6 rolls, and made the largest difference when the dice pool was large, which in
HGB indicates an ‘easy’ Attack or Defense; this seems counterintuitive to us. An additional
benefit is that it is quicker to ‘read’ a handful of dice you’ve just rolled and determine the
result, and also easier and more intuitive to predict how successful an Attack will be.

Ok, I see what you're saying.

 warboss wrote:
He is likely referring to this:

Yup, that's the one. There's some excellent criticisms there, but it doesn't seem clear that their change has the impact they want. By changing to the cinematic Sil roll (highest, +1 for additional sixes) extra dice don't do much for the outcome unless you only have 1D or 2D to begin with. If you already have 4D DEF for instance adding +1D for your skill is basically pointless; you're already extremely likely to roll a 6, and not likely to roll an additional 6. I'm happy to see someone doing houserules, and I hope it works for them, it just seems odd to me.

I was really surprised by their statement that 1D was a common roll. I'm wondering where that came into play, because 1D rolls should have been quite rare.

I've grown fond of the way rolls work in the RPG I'm currently working on, namely Tenra Bansho Zero.

It, as do most of the japanese RPGs, use exclusively d6s with a dice pool system. The way it works is like this:

- Difficulty of a roll is 1+
- You roll as many dice as the attribute related to the roll, which will depend on the situation
- On a roll, a die is a success if the value is equal to or lower than the skill you're rolling for (i.e., if you're rolling, say, Pilot, and your character has Pilot (3), every die with 3 or less is a success).
- On opposed rolls, the side with more successes wins.

I've found it works quite decently on the table.

Binomial distributions work quite well, although they tend to prioritize number of attempts over probability of success, but honestly, all a dice system does is randomly generate success or failure for an action.

When designing the game, the hard part is not to create a good dice system, it's to figure out what the probability of success should be. Yet many designers focus on the system, and, even worse, don't do the maths and just assume that whatever crazy hypothesis they have about how the parameters interact is true.

mrondeau wrote:
When designing the game, the hard part is not to create a good dice system, it's to figure out what the probability of success should be. Yet many designers focus on the system, and, even worse, don't do the maths and just assume that whatever crazy hypothesis they have about how the parameters interact is true.

This is too true, the math is an important part, and does a lot to determine the "feel" of a game.

 IceRaptor wrote:
I love that black and red color scheme warboss - that looks really great!

Thanks! My original idea of blue, red, and white (not necessarily meant to be Team America; feth yeah! gungho patriotic) ended up looking too similar to the Ultramagnus Transformer, lol.

 Albertorius wrote:
I've grown fond of the way rolls work in the RPG I'm currently working on, namely Tenra Bansho Zero.

Humorously that's very similar to the house rules I'm working on. I futzed with various dice schemes for a few months, trying to make them fit the probability models I wanted. Finally I decided that I was making the game too much about the dice instead of the experience. So while the outcomes aren't exactly what I want, the simplicity of the system makes up for that. Funny so many folks end up with a binomial distribution....


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 warboss wrote:
Thanks! My original idea of blue, red, and white (not necessarily meant to be Team America; feth yeah! gungho patriotic) ended up looking too similar to the Ultramagnus Transformer, lol.

I can no longer unsee that model as Ultramagnus. Though to be fair, if you added an eagle, flag and some fireworks it would totally fit Team America!

hey folks, bought the blitz 2 player box the other day.
but seeing as i have 0 knowlage of this universe i dont know how to assemble the models as i dont know what wep is where on the sprues.

i want to make north and south forces in the 2p box as balanced as possible for the purpouse of learning the game, but idk how to.

The 2-player box is supposed to be "balanced" for immediate play, so if you can make the models match the pictures, you should be fine.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
hey folks, bought the blitz 2 player box the other day.
but seeing as i have 0 knowlage of this universe i dont know how to assemble the models as i dont know what wep is where on the sprues.

i want to make north and south forces in the 2p box as balanced as possible for the purpouse of learning the game, but idk how to.

Does a physical copy of this come with the starter? If not, you might find this free pdf helpful.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/192252/Heavy-Gear-Blitz--Plastic-Miniatures-Assembly-Guide

As for balance, I can't help too much there unfortunately as I'm a few book revisions out of date myself. I'd definitely recommend not building more than two of any variant of a model as IIRC that's the max you can have in each squad except for the base version (unless they've changed that since).

No, that guide is not included in the box, nor any hint of its existance.
I guess i got an early run box.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
The 2-player box is supposed to be "balanced" for immediate play, so if you can make the models match the pictures, you should be fine.

Allright.

Say, did DP9 attend to Gen Con this year? Wasn't paying attention, but now that I think about it, I belive the did not...

Good question... a quick check of the mostly dead forums got me this thread about Robert being at a different convention last weekend. I guess DP9 didn't go? The only time I don't remember them going to gencon since 1994 when I first met them with HG's debut was the year or two when they went all hollywood and gave up tabletop gaming for tv show production (seriously, not joking). I can't blame Robert if he was looking at paying for the booth and working it solo for the whole weekend with Dave seeming gone after his announcement (last year?). Normally they'd have fans step up and help but most of those that would back in the day (along with most everyone else) don't seem to be posting in the official forums anymore indicating a general lack of interest in the hardcore fanbase. Maybe they all moved over to facebook instead?

http://dp9forum.com/index.php?/topic/18349-dream-pod-9-attending-otakuthon-2018-this-coming-weekend-in-montreal/&tab=comments#comment-312011

Hm. Interesting....

DP9 was there last year, I stopped by, but I didnt go this year so I have no idea.

Did they ever get more staff?

Like Warboss said, they gave it a pass this year, but are going next year (maybe?) when they have both kickstarters finished.

@Charistoph
Not that they've said on their forums. I haven't visited their actual site for several months.

Interesting... this year's Gen Con has been kinda weird, all told. I think that, apart from FFG, WotC and a couple others, it seems like the industry is moving on from Gen Con, at least releases wise.

It seems like KS is actually harming them in that regard.

 Mmmpi wrote:
Like Warboss said, they gave it a pass this year, but are going next year (maybe?) when they have both kickstarters finished.

@Charistoph
Not that they've said on their forums. I haven't visited their actual site for several months.

I heard that they are down to only a very few people, so that may be why they didn't show at GenCon. Of course, if you want to get backers, you have to go where the backers are, and those Cons are a great place to showcase your kickstarters, so...

 Albertorius wrote:
Interesting... this year's Gen Con has been kinda weird, all told. I think that, apart from FFG, WotC and a couple others, it seems like the industry is moving on from Gen Con, at least releases wise.

It seems like KS is actually harming them in that regard.

I've always viewed it as the Kickstarters are in a way a very advanced and public preorder system mixed in with almost free (5% KS fee) advertising. New stuff still gets promoted at gencon and, more importantly, gets sold there first before those gullible backers get their items shipped. In a way, it's a double dipping for the games manufacturers. Instead of first announcing and offering the game at the convention (the old way), they announce it and collect funds on KS and then sell it first (and keep 97-100% of the MSRP) at the con.

 Albertorius wrote:
Interesting... this year's Gen Con has been kinda weird, all told. I think that, apart from FFG, WotC and a couple others, it seems like the industry is moving on from Gen Con, at least releases wise.

It seems like KS is actually harming them in that regard.

Very true. It's a great way to piss off your loyal customer base. Start a KS, get you loyal customers to chip in, then release at GenCon before your loyal customers get their KS rewards!