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Mutter wrote:
170k? O.o
It's almost like they WANT the campaign to slow down ...

I think it's been said before, but you have to think about this mathematically to understand why they increase the gaps between stretch goals like this. The more backers that join equals more free stuff CMON has to provide. This increases exponentially every time either a new backer joins or a new SG is reached. It's all about managing their costs.

Watched the gameplay vids, as I was still on the fence, and... I'm out.

In 15 min of play they were still fighting the first monsters in the first room, and it sure looked like all their actions were basically "walk up to monster, hit monster in melee." I want interesting choices, every turn, for every hero, and I want a game that takes significantly less time to play than D&D, if I'm buying a dungeon bash game. Minis are a good deal but I have Bones III on the way.

The Overseer and Nightmare Thing have my attention. Otherwise, most of the other sculpts aren't to my taste. It's interesting that they decided to go more Japanese anime with their oversized weapons on this than they did in Black Plague. That remark might inspire some of you to challenge me on that, but seriously, compare them. You don't even need to look at Lord Tusk, just average characters with swords in Black Plague vs. Massive Darkness - the Black Plague weapons mostly look pretty reasonably proportioned, the Massive Darkness ones not so much.

It's also too bad that Massive Darkness couldn't come up with a plastic character board as elegant as Black Plague's. I get that Massive Darkness is dealing with more variables, so it requires a more complex board with more peg holes, which is harder to integrate with the player card (which is why the two sit side by side, rather than fitting one into the other). But I do love Black Plague's way of putting all the info and cards in one handy place. To do the same, Massive Darkness would have needed larger plastic player boards, maybe the size of a sheet of paper, say. Personally, I think that would have been awesome. Maybe they'll move towards that in a future game. The whole plastic dashboard thing CMON is doing is genius and long overdue for adventure boardgames with loot, skills, life, and other character data to track. Maybe it'll catch on and become an industry standard? It definitely makes going back to messier systems look very unappealing.

Black Plague is great, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm playing it wrong. It seems a little too challenging at the moment - I love games where I can lose, but wins have been scarce - and micromanaging all the zombies that end up on the board by the 2nd half of the game is tremendously time consuming. Which actually leads me to a pertinent question: is Massive Darkness going to have similar amounts of enemies on the board, or will their hordes be smaller? Zombicide is leading us to struggle to fit 20+ zombies on a single square by game's end (and substituting tokens to make it work).

I only have the base game of Black Plague and 2 guest artists I picked up off ebay. The game felt very easy, and then a luck draw of a repulse spell, and our ranged character got dual wield repeater crossbows. It got boring real fast when we spent more time just pushing large hordes of zombies from one tile to another.

I have a feeling Massive Darkness looks to be the same, im hoping not, and at $120 for just the base game, I'll be ok with that.

Zombicide isn't supposed to have that many zombies in the first place - you're supposed to be killing them as they appear, and then getting the heck outta there!

MD likely won't have as many monsters running around, as they're not adding so many extra minions, instead concentrating on Roaming Monsters and Heroes.

I suspect that these games work better when played with some focus, rather than a giant kitchen sink of everything released to date.

Overseer Blog - http://monster-zer0.blogspot.ie/2016/07/massive-darkness-overseer.html

Again another of Jason's own designs that wasn't even commissioned by GG.

The overseer will be a perfect boss for a D&D quest I have planned with lots of Grell and other crazy Aberrations. (I have some of the actual grell models from the D&D boardgame and they're much smaller so would be good minions)

I gotta say.. I have some Skaven.. I have some lizard people.. but I like that these are both off of a whole different mindset than GW clones or other lather rinse repeat designs we've seen before. Yeah, they do kind of have a certain look that is a bit same-y next to other MD figures but I don't see that as a bad thing so long as you're a fan of that style

For anyone looking to take their D&D session physical, you can't beat this. Bones is fine, but the material has some issues and many of the sculpts are dated and disjointed.

These models are like a perfect DM toolkit. Perfect variety and male/female heroes, Mooks with casters and commanders in a bunch of races in numbers which warrant murdering and monsters which can fill any campaign.

If this was on the table against bones 1 from a mini perspective, I think I would have rather had these sculpts in this material.

Anyone have a link to a pledge calc?

nkelsch wrote:
For anyone looking to take their D&D session physical, you can't beat this.

Bones is fine, but the material has some issues and many of the sculpts are dated and disjointed.

These models are like a perfect DM toolkit.

IIRC, D&D is on 1" grid, so you'd have to address the tiles if you wanted to use them directly.

To be fair, CMoN's bendy PVC/PU plastic isn't exactly the best compared to hard HIPS, but I would agree that it's clearly better than the extra-bendy stuff in Bones!

For $150, it's not a bad sandbox. It has good variety of heroes and monsters, although I'd rather have gotten the rats and lizards over the cavemen and dorfs -- I like my monsters non-human whereever possible. Being underground, it's a little disappointing not to have not-Drow. And being a dungeon crawler, it's hugely disappointing not to have any sort of dragon, not even a hatchling / youngling.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

nkelsch wrote:
For anyone looking to take their D&D session physical, you can't beat this.

Bones is fine, but the material has some issues and many of the sculpts are dated and disjointed.

These models are like a perfect DM toolkit.

IIRC, D&D is on 1" grid, so you'd have to address the tiles if you wanted to use them directly.

To be fair, CMoN's bendy PVC/PU plastic isn't exactly the best compared to hard HIPS, but I would agree that it's clearly better than the extra-bendy stuff in Bones!

For $150, it's not a bad sandbox. It has good variety of heroes and monsters, although I'd rather have gotten the rats and lizards over the cavemen and dorfs -- I like my monsters non-human whereever possible. Being underground, it's a little disappointing not to have not-Drow. And being a dungeon crawler, it's hugely disappointing not to have any sort of dragon, not even a hatchling / youngling.

You can just measure in 1" increments.. once you can remember that 1" =~ 5' translating to direct measure isn't that hard. If you're playing DDM then yeah.. you kinda need the grids.

That said.. it looks like Secret Weapon, Reaper, and Dark Arts are teaming up to do PVC dungeon tiles.. so add those to this and wowzers..

When I wrote it, I was thinking less DDM and more D&D Tabletop Wargame (i.e. 4E).

But yeah, once could measure . Or overlay grids for DDM.

Or make your own maps.

I'll probably throw a buck in tomorrow to see where Story Mode goes.

They clearly like ogres





Graz & Prug prove that two heads are indeed better than one. They have all the crushing strength natural to ogres, but having two heads means they're never caught off-guard. They never lose Defense when attacked by a hero in Shadow Mode. Plus, if one head is knocked out, the other just keeps on controlling the body, so Graz & Prug can never be stunned.

A wild Ettin appears!

Unless Massive Darkness expands to outdoor environments, or really, really large rooms, a Dragon probably doesn't make much sense.

But I still want one!

Ogre is pretty cool. Not sure if I would have liked him more with only one head, or the fact that he has two makes him more interesting of a model.

As far as dragon... well I think thatll be the expansion down the road. Im actually starting to get a little worried about something "big and awesome" happening before it ends. Im still thinking 2 SG's after this ogre is all that is *likely* to be suprassed.

Hope Im wrong though.

Young Dragonets / Dragonlings would fit fine.

Thiago has said point blank no dragons so I really doubt we'll see anything along those lines

that's next time

If we can have a zillion Ogres, we can have multiple Dragons. Just sayin'

Back in for a $. Hope I can stretch my ramen noodles packs further

Anyone in the us got enough experience with cmon KS's to have an idea what were probably looking at for a shipping cost with this many SG's? Just asking about the basic pledge for now nothing added on.

As Thiago has said, there are no dragons planned for this campaign.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 xevv wrote:
Anyone in the us got enough experience with cmon KS's to have an idea what were probably looking at for a shipping cost with this many SG's? Just asking about the basic pledge for now nothing added on.

In PA you should probably expect from $12-$16

That depends on where you are. For California, I'm expecting $25-30

Black Plague was $30 to Cali

That's why I see this as at $150 shipped, taking it squarely out of the "impulse buy" category.

cincydooley wrote:As Thiago has said, there are no dragons planned for this campaign.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 xevv wrote:
Anyone in the us got enough experience with cmon KS's to have an idea what were probably looking at for a shipping cost with this many SG's? Just asking about the basic pledge for now nothing added on.

In PA you should probably expect from $12-$16

Good enough for me.

JohnHwangDD wrote:That depends on where you are. For California, I'm expecting $25-30

Black Plague was $30 to Cali

That's why I see this as at $150 shipped, taking it squarely out of the "impulse buy" category.

Yea I get that, its why I was trying to ballpark the final cost a little more. I like a fair bit of the stuff and its somewhere between good and better than good value. But the simple truth is I just dont need it. I dunno Ill probably end up with it even if that super tempting end of campaign item doesnt appear. *shrug* I have no self restraint

In Penn, you're probably OK to budget $15. I could see you at a "worst case" of $20, but I really doubt it'll be that high for PA.

Honestly, I'm seriously wondering if I should just hold out for MD2, which should have the Dragon that I want.

Yea looks like 20 should cover it for me for sure. found someone in that thread in PA who got BP for 17.

I feel like Im in such a small minority, I'm perfectly fine not seeing a dragon.Im actually kind of glad. Ive already got way too many of them from various places over the last 2 decades.

Plus nothing is going to top the old forge world fire dragon imo

I totally agree that not all games need dragons. I just think it would have been nice for this one. Even if we're definitely not getting one. Because... reasons.

So if you're no longer interested (again), and lack of dragons is a downer, and shipping is too expensive, and the final nail in the coffin...

..see you in the Robotech RPG Tactics thread then?

I knew from the get-go that shipping would be $30. The question that I've been wrestling with is whether the base pledge would be worth $150.

I would really like a Gnoll minion grouping as an add-on. I always liked Gnolls.

I think I'll stick with pledging $128 (Base + Black Plague Cards).

I am resisting the urge to add the rats and lizards for right now.

 xevv wrote:
Yea looks like 20 should cover it for me for sure. found someone in that thread in PA who got BP for 17.

I feel like Im in such a small minority, I'm perfectly fine not seeing a dragon.Im actually kind of glad. Ive already got way too many of them from various places over the last 2 decades.

Plus nothing is going to top the old forge world fire dragon imo

I THINK this package will be slightly smaller than the BP knight level box, simply due to the lack of the Wolfsberg expansion. That being said, I'm not ENTIRELY sure how large the boxes for the minion expansions will be.