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This one isn't broken, for me anyways, but I do like it when people groan at...

...Orbital Bombardment.

Every time I use it, it misses or does almost nothing. Yet every time I pull out that pie plate on turn 1... oh look out for the Spess Mahreens, but then, flop! Never tried doubling up on them before but I imagine I'd only produce duplicate results.

I even tried to do the whole OB + Charge, and I nuked my own dudes! Pretty funny considering my opponent looked about ready to quit if I had succeeded!

privateer4hire wrote:

 master of ordinance wrote:
Unbound. No way in hell should GW have introduced that.

Also, the AP system in 40K. Armour reduction would be better than the all or nothing system we have atmo

That would be cool, armor reduct, that is.
So would, for example, AP6 be a -1, AP5 a -2, etc.?
If so would an AP2 weapon negate saves entirely except for Invulnerables?

Star Fleet Battles had/has a system we used during playtesting of most of the early games, expansions, and supplements, where you allowed every seventh point of damage to penetrate shields or armor.

We later adopted this to Leviathan by FASA, and to Task Force Games' own Starfire (which was supposed to be a speed-play massed starship game).

Only all of these games suffered by having the ships remain absolutely untouched while megatons of energy were directed at them, yet somehow remain intact while that same energy took out individual systems once the shields were gone.

We adopted the same sort of rules to All/Nothing armor saves. We gave weapons damage values, and the armor basically described how many points of damage the armor took from the incoming damage.

So, if your armor was 4, and the incoming damage was 9, you would have every fourth point of damage get through the armor (or two points).

It did mean upping the amount of damage each figure could take, but overall it worked out quite well.

My favorite Sci-Fi game, Striker had a similar flaw in its armor/penetration rules as well, where they TRIED to make a variable penetration system, but it just wound up being an all/nothing system where the chance of getting through the armor was slightly adjusted. Again, all it took was a slight alteration of the system to change to a proportional system, whereby the damage might be totally deflected (the "nothing" part of things), or it could wind up as anywhere from 5% - 95% penetration. We also managed to get runs for over-penetration with that system, so that if the penetration value of a weapon was more than 200% of an armor's protection, then you stood a good chance of just punching a hole straight through a vehicle without doing much else.

• That is one of the inherent limitations of basing games on a d6 roll. You have such a narrow range of possible armor/penetration values. Which I think is a "Broken Rule" to begin with.

MB

privateer4hire wrote:

 master of ordinance wrote:
Unbound. No way in hell should GW have introduced that.

Also, the AP system in 40K. Armour reduction would be better than the all or nothing system we have atmo

That would be cool, armor reduct, that is.
So would, for example, AP6 be a -1, AP5 a -2, etc.?
If so would an AP2 weapon negate saves entirely except for Invulnerables?

Yep, thats how it used to be in 2nd edition. Pretty damn fun too - you actually felt that the krak missile was a bunker buster capable of hurting even termies, rather than reachin meq's and then flopping with an "Im done" at terminators

All CAMO lists in Infinity N2.
The frustration of seeing a table full of markers, knowing full well half will blow up in your face the other half so tear you a new one either by shooting or hacking. Then there's TO CAMO in addition. Luv IT.

I had a fighter in 1st ed AD&D that was double specialized in darts. That gave a +3 to hit and damage, on a weapon that did 1-3 against medium sized and smaller creatures, 1-2 vs large. If I remember the table correctly, a specialist in darts could throw 3 per round at levels 1-6, 4 at levels 7-12, and 5 at level 13+. Back in that edition anything over lvl 9 was pretty high. However, you didn't get Str damage when using darts, so that was a bit of a counterbalance. The rest of the part laughed when they found out double specialized in darts instead of the two scimitars I used (before the famous Drizzit, and no I was not a DE, female human). Then came the day when we were hunting an ancient red dragon that had been terrorizing the area. It saw us while it was flying high, cast quite a few spells, including one that changed its breath weapon from fire to cold, rendering our fire resist spells/items useless. First breath weapon attack from the hasted, enlarged, and invisible dragon almost killed the entire party. But the dragon's overflight hadn't put it too far away from me. At this point my DM found out why I had been spending all that money on those Darts of a Hornet's Nest. When thrown, a +1 dart would split into 5-20 darts. So 5 darts X and average of 12 darts, doing 1-2 points of damage, +3 for specialization, +1 for magic, meant I just hit the dragon that had a maximum of 88 hit points, for a minimum of 300 damage. Assuming they all hit, and with the THACO of a 14 level fighter with a 16 Dex and the other bonuses, meant I missed on about a 3 or better on a D20. Dragon looked like it had run into anti aircraft fire at Normandy. Never found another Dart of the Hornet's Nest for sale ever again, or in a treasure pile.

Virus grenades and virus outbreak card in 2nd edition either did nothing, or would wipe out a large swath of and opponent's army. As bad as vortex grenades were, virus cards were way worse.

Conversion field in 2nd edtion. If the model mades its field save then it created a flash of light which blinded, on a 4+ rolling for each model, all models within Str radius of the attack it blocked, if the model didn't have protected senses. Blinded models were WS 1. So first you had to dig through the books to figure out what would have protected senses, since that wasn't a listed characteristic. Since close combat was handled one model at a time, this going off could completely fubar one side or the other.

Invisibility in 7th edition, that power is stupidly broken.

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