weasel_beef wrote:Hey man, the ad here on Dakka caught my eye so I went ahead and printed out the rules from your website and read through them last night.
The game seems fun and appears to be more streamlined than other rule sets out there right now. The order dice system and
2d6 mechanic for combat resolution is different and cool; I'm a big fan of the alternating activation for soldiers versus the traditional
40k IGOUGO system, it seems like it'll flow especially well with a smaller scale skirmish game like this.
A couple of things rules-wise stood out to me: the Initiative (I) stat and the armor value being constant.
Having the (I) stat represent what is traditionally a to hit, to wound, dodge, and save roll all in one number is interesting. I haven't played any games with anything like that yet, so I don't really know how it'll affect gameplay. My initial reaction is that it'll help the game flow and not drag on...having a quick
2d6 versus the enemy and gleaning all the combat resolution info from that value plus existing unit data seems like it'll be easy and keep things moving. On the other hand, I can see how some folks would think that having the (I) stat alone determine the hit, wound, and dodge could take away from the depth of each soldier.
As far as the armor value being constant throughout the game, I feel like that is the one of the only unrealistic parts of a rule set that otherwise strictly adheres to the virtues of realism (movement/cover/actions). I'd imagine that after 3 rounds of taking fire from a despicable Coven trooper, a Private's armor would have degraded as a result of the beating it has taken and not be as effective in later rounds. I don't know how you would represent this rules-wise without bogging down the flow of the game as it currently exists. Decreasing the armor value as the game progresses or per attack suffered seems clunky. Maybe for a few special weapons adding something that lets that particular weapon ignore the first 2 points of a soldier's armor or something? I honestly have no idea. I know it's a very nit-picky comment and the constant armor thing in no way discourages me or makes me like the rule set less, just throwing out a few things that came to mind after reading the rules.
A few other things not related to the rules. I chuckled at "instinctive furry" on page 7, second sentence in the description of Phase 2/Special Actions. Assuming it meant "fury". A few other typos here and there, but overall very well laid out and presented. The information flowed naturally and the rules were easy to understand in the order they were presented...no need to flip from page 12 to page 4 and back again to understand what was happening.
The name itself, Starfall, could be problematic down the road. When I google Starfall, Starfall game, or Starfall tabletop...https://www.starfalltt.com/ doesn't come up until page 2 of searching Starfall tabletop. Looks like there is another boardgame with the same name, as well as a few online games, and some hooked-on-phonics type product. I like the name a lot and think it definitely sounds cool, but it'll be hard to get additional exposure online if it's hard to google. Warhammer, Warmachine, Maelstrom's Edge, Warpath, etc...those all pop up on page one with the name alone, most are the number one search result/match.
All together, I really like this game and feel like it has a lot of potential. Your YouTube channel is good and having how-to videos is great. I watched the first two last night, it's nice to see the game in action to add a little context to reading the rules alone. I admire the passion you have for this and the effort you're putting into it. Hopefully one day we'll see a print/published copy of the rulebook; there's a lot of promise here and I look forward to being a part of the Starfall community.
Hey weasel_beef! Fantastic write-up of your initial impressions and excitement! I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to dive into the game and give it a thorough look through. Yay for Ads doing their job! haha.
I would love to dialogue a bit about your feedback, and I'll go point-by-point to make it easy to track as we chat.
1) Very very happy to hear you're enjoying the fundamental game mechanics overall. I have been gaming for well over a decade now, and I am fortunate to be working with other game companies' trial-and-errors, great-ideas-misapplied, and overall lessons-learned. haha. Hopefully Starfall applies a lot of those lessons winsomely, and I am glad to hear you think it does thus far!
2) Initiative. You're now the second the second player to mention a--completely understandable--concern about Initiative being a catch-all stat. Thankfully, that player also wrote to me in another forum, and I was able to chat about it a bit with him in writing. Here were my thoughts then and now:
"That's a great question, and I am happy to share with you a few reasons why I made Initiative a catch-all stat instead of breaking it into
BS,
WS and
PS. First, and probably foremost, my reasoning was for ease and efficiency of play. With each player commanding an average of 7 units per side, that's 14 different soldiers to keep track of, often with unique load-outs and rules. I quickly realized in developing the game that the stat-line of soldiers were going to have to be more in the X-Wing Miniatures range and not so much in the Warhammer range in order to keep the game moving at a decent and engaging rate of play. I didn't want players staring at stat sheets every new order, but rather I wanted the stat-lines to become easy to remember and intuitive to use.
Second, from a game designer's perspective, keeping one stat in-check for nearly 200 unique units is much easier than keeping 3 different stats balanced. This is especially true as I am still a one-man operation doing this as a hobby! haha. It makes my job easier, but really it also protects the game from big imbalances and unnecessary errors. As you dive more into the ruleset and supplements (and I hope you do! Even give the game a play or two!) you will find that
BS,
WS, and
PS are still present in spirit, but all three are significantly dictated by weapon and relic options, soldier's potential load out, and battlefield circumstances. These are variables that are much harder for "meta/min-max players" to account for, making the game much more safe from being "broken".
Third, and finally for now, I found that using only 1 stat vs. 3 stats does actually not stifle variety or customization. As hinted above, ranged attacks, close combat and psychic abilities are all worked out with slightly different mechanics. The mechanics are related enough to make game play easy, but different enough that soldier load outs and battlefield circumstances significantly impact a soldier's options and abilities. While the initiative stat is extremely important in Starfall, it is also highly malleable/volatile within game. Just one example: two opposing soldiers have the same initiative value of 4. One is more of a "heavy weapons specialist" while the other is a "psychic support", which means their initiative is going to be helpful in different ways. For the heavy weapons guy, his initiative will be helpful for attack rolls with his big guns, while the psychic uses his initiative more for making psychic power rolls. Their load outs are very different, and thus their initiative is valuable in different ways. Both use the same initiative for dodge rolls, sure, but this can be further manipulated based on battlefield circumstances, such as being behind cover and being "down". And initiative can always be manipulated by many different relics, as well, for different situations. Thus, it is easy to remember that each soldier has a base initiative of 4. That takes no effort on the part of either player. But it's the engaging nature of the game and battlefield that makes those stats meaningful in unique ways."
I hope my answer to this player is helpful in explaining my reasoning to you as well!
3) Armor is a static trait because it's semantically more like a "resistance" or "toughness" value that helps soften the blow from big hits. Because of how the games works--as you'll see when you play it (hopefully a LOT!
)--since hitting and wounding is very streamlined into one roll, to hit typically needs a high-ish roll and thus many wounds will be applied. Thus, the armor is a value that helps diffuse those wounds. Basically, if you notice as you look closely, the rolling system for everything is
2D6, but with each rolling mechanic, there is almost always a third number that is added that falls between 1-6. Thus, the system is technically a
3D6 system, with one die value (initiative value) always known before rolling (ingenious, I know
). Certain weapons have a positive wound mod, thus making the
2D6 wounds again a
3D6, but the armor is like a nice negative
D6 buff for defense against those attacks. If that all sounds confusing, just play the game and it'll make sense. hahaha
4) Glad you like the flow of the rules and ease of reading. That makes me happy! It almost makes me as happy as "instinctive furry" hahahaha. You're the first person to catch that one. Gonna leave it for giggles, and will edit if we ever need to make a new version.
5) We are working on the site's SEO, which takes a lot of time. Hopefully as more people click on the site and populate it's pages, the higher the site will rank. Hearing that it's even on page 2 is a huge step up from when we first started. haha. But yeah, I love the name too. It's unfortunate how popular it is with a few niche companies, but for a completely free, independent ruleset I'm not too concerned about being perfectly searchable on the first try.
Very excited to hear how excited you are for the ruleset and I do, definitely, hope you play a game or twelve and fall in love with it! Do be sure to share your games with us when you play! Would love to see what you come up with!
FREE, then why not check it out and pleasantly surprise yourself with a fantastic new game?!
