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Vorian wrote:

A player may voluntarily fail a Bottle roll if he wishes
to do so. In which case there is no need to actually
take the test, it is assumed to automatically fail as the
gangers melt into the shadows and retreat. Note that
all the conditions for taking a Bottle roll (25%
causalities) still need to be met.

From NCE, so will be the same as the latest official rules

I'm glad someone brought up the NCE. There have been efforts to better balance the rules, skills and equipment in the community edition. Is it perfect? No, but it reduces the disparity and tries to reel in the shenanigans and make bad skills viable. I for one would not like GW to remake Necromunda. I feel the Yaktribe community has done more to produce and harshly playtest the living ruleset. There are still things that need refining but they try and fix problems. If GW re-releases Necro they will just do a half-hearted job that is no where near what it should be. Necromunda is never going to be a serious game as it was a campaign system with a fighting ruleset, more like an rpg. Our old gaming group would allow collusion, bartering and intergang commerce in the post-battle sequence. I think GW would just do a one-off and chop out all the customization like others have said.

nou wrote:
I second that question - why on earth every game has to be competetive? Necromunda clearly isn't one.

I can't even imagine why you'd have "competitive" Necromunda.

I mean sure, you could make a Delaque gang where everyone has Lasguns and Laspistols so you can mostly ignore ammo rolls, and then try to get Marksman and Infiltration on everyone... but where'd be the fun in that?

nou wrote:
I simply pointed out, that your experience with unballanced scenarios might, just might be due to innapropriate handling of this game? I never had problems with brokenly one sided scenarios. Even basic Gang Fight is a brain-stretcher on a densely packed terrain. I can get gangs to CC, "all overwatch" isn't a viable strategy on my tables and since you can win games with fresh juves with hand flamers I don't realy see where this "necromunda needs heavy rebalance of scenarios because only Scavengers require anything other than shooting each other" is coming from...

I think you're reading too much into my "line up and shoot" comment. I was more getting at the point that Gang Fight is boring because you just kill one another.

*snore*

And most the scenarios are bad. Ambush can be fun but it's pretty one sided. And all the ones with limited forces, sentries and other random crap? Not interesting. Shootout was a scenario we played just to pass time waiting for other players to finish up their games.

Necros wrote:
Did Patrick Stewart ever have hair?

I'm all for Newcromunda. i'm gonna be scared into preordering so I don't miss it like shadow war armageddon

Yes.



I must admit, a friend and I are just getting into Necromunda, so we're kinda waiting with a mix of baited breath and utter dread as to what will happen. It's not that I don't trust GW, it's just that I trust them to make an utter mess of things given half a chance. I'm not sure I could face a new edition. But we'll see what they have in store for us.

The three previous editions are all easily available, so just get stuck in. No need to play a new edition (which almost certainly isn't what's being announced in September) if you don't want to.

Yeah 'cause God forbid we have any wishes or desires for a new version when we can just go back to the old one!

I was referring specifically to Jon Garret's "I'm not sure I could face a new edition". Personally I'm quite interested in a new edition. Not that there'll be one until about 2020, the rate things are going.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
The three previous editions are all easily available, so just get stuck in. No need to play a new edition (which almost certainly isn't what's being announced in September) if you don't want to.

But, but, I'm not allowed to play any games that aren't new-release currently supported Games Workshop games.

 Azazelx wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
The three previous editions are all easily available, so just get stuck in. No need to play a new edition (which almost certainly isn't what's being announced in September) if you don't want to.

But, but, I'm not allowed to play any games that aren't new-release currently supported Games Workshop games.

What? No one told me this!!! <hides multiple converted gangs and pretends he doesn't have a lot of fun playing Necromunda Community Edition>

Necromunda isn't meant to be played competitively. It doesn't need to be super-balanced. Attempts to make it balanced will rob it of its charm.

 ekwatts wrote:
Necromunda isn't meant to be played competitively. It doesn't need to be super-balanced. Attempts to make it balanced will rob it of its charm.

That doesn't make sense. Fixing the stupid stuff doesn't stop any of the things that give it charm.

It stops the maddening aspects and gives you a more fun basis to hand your campaign on.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

nou wrote:
I second that question - why on earth every game has to be competetive? Necromunda clearly isn't one.

I can't even imagine why you'd have "competitive" Necromunda.

I mean sure, you could make a Delaque gang where everyone has Lasguns and Laspistols so you can mostly ignore ammo rolls, and then try to get Marksman and Infiltration on everyone... but where'd be the fun in that?

nou wrote:
I simply pointed out, that your experience with unballanced scenarios might, just might be due to innapropriate handling of this game? I never had problems with brokenly one sided scenarios. Even basic Gang Fight is a brain-stretcher on a densely packed terrain. I can get gangs to CC, "all overwatch" isn't a viable strategy on my tables and since you can win games with fresh juves with hand flamers I don't realy see where this "necromunda needs heavy rebalance of scenarios because only Scavengers require anything other than shooting each other" is coming from...

I think you're reading too much into my "line up and shoot" comment. I was more getting at the point that Gang Fight is boring because you just kill one another.

*snore*

And most the scenarios are bad. Ambush can be fun but it's pretty one sided. And all the ones with limited forces, sentries and other random crap? Not interesting. Shootout was a scenario we played just to pass time waiting for other players to finish up their games.

For me Gang Fight isn't really about killing eachother but about turf war and capturing territory by inflicting 3:1 casaulty ratio. This usually won't happen spontaneously, especially when both players are prepared for what's coming and require a lot of focus. Some of my more chess-like necromunda games were "simple" Gang Fights and real brain stretchers. Hit&Run can be a lot of fun on a complex enough table so that attacker's goal isn't obvious from the start.

Vorian wrote:

 ekwatts wrote:
Necromunda isn't meant to be played competitively. It doesn't need to be super-balanced. Attempts to make it balanced will rob it of its charm.

That doesn't make sense. Fixing the stupid stuff doesn't stop any of the things that give it charm.

It stops the maddening aspects and gives you a more fun basis to hand your campaign on.

Perhaps for you it doesn't but I personally like playing against all odds very much and consider it fun and main aspect of Necromunda. I like trying to figure out how to manouver my gang to take out this well placed BS6 specialist or steal crushing victory by playing this last turn in a gambit just to down that second ganger and defend my territory. The harder the game the better and ballancing every aspect of Necromunda will strip me of natural opportunities of such strongly biased games and would require me to design such scenarios intentionally. If, in turn, it gets to easy for me to play because I have a strong gang I just try more suicidal "do or die" moves and keep the game challanging by inevitable permalosting. If someone has particularily deadly ganger I will put everything on one card and forfeit the goal of any mission just to assure his death or captivity. I don't feel any need whatsoever to "fix" necromunda because those uneven odds and unpredictability of outcome are what is most appealing to me. I don't even like many of the changes made in NCE (like Plasma Pistol just to name one of them). I get bored by "fair, ballanced games" because they tend to be solvable and dull in the long run and I like to play often. And in Necromunda unballanced aspects aren't cherry-pickable for deliberate abuse as is the case in 40K list building and you can easily land on both ends of the stick, so why should they be removed if they are not unanimously considered unfun by the whole community?

I have played in (and won!) Necromunda tournaments. It's good fun as a 2 day event, with starting gangs, no casualties and predefined advances and trading. You can be a lot more gung ho when you don't need to worry about being crippled.

But Necromunda truly lives and breathes in campaigns, terrifying imbalances and all.

Yes, I've taken part in a couple of one-day events, where the win condition was to have the greatest increase in gang rating.

In the first event, I won handily by legitimately rolling 3 Archaeotech Hoards as territories, rolling 18D6 x 10 for income before the last game and stocking up on gear. Something I would definitely never have done in a "proper" campaign.

xerxeshavelock wrote:
Oh ffs - my painting queue is already stacked.....

Haha! I know what you mean! Loved that game and I'm over booked with models to paint myself.

@nou, it's far easier to introduce random story elements to unbalance stuff as you see fit than for everyone to agree fixes to an unbalanced mess. If you're at that point and you don't care about the game being a true game but more of a story event with some rules then the fact you're altering balanced rules makes no difference.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in watching your gang develop due to your own decisions - whilst also keeping it as a competitive game, then you require a solid ruleset. I want a campaign to develop naturally, not have it as a series of power level 9,000 super gangers unleashing their powers on each other or having to make stuff up outside the game to compensate.

Nowhere has it ever been written that Necromunda was intended to not be at its core, a fun game.

Vorian wrote:
@nou, it's far easier to introduce random story elements to unbalance stuff as you see fit than for everyone to agree fixes to an unbalanced mess. If you're at that point and you don't care about the game being a true game but more of a story event with some rules then the fact you're altering balanced rules makes no difference.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in watching your gang develop due to your own decisions - whilst also keeping it as a competitive game, then you require a solid ruleset. I want a campaign to develop naturally, not have it as a series of power level 9,000 super gangers unleashing their powers on each other or having to make stuff up outside the game to compensate.

Nowhere has it ever been written that Necromunda was intended to not be at its core, a fun game.

Everything I wrote to you personally was intended to show you, that very definitions of fun vary wildly and what you consider unfun has a very strong community behind it. After all Necromunda has a 20 year old active community and no one is trying to do a rewrite in the spirit of what you are talking about. Instead we have popular Yaktribe and NCE that still have those "unfun mess" elements you're trying to convince everybody are unfun. Have you considered, that maybe, just maybe Necromunda isn't really what you seek after as it was never ever intended as a competetive game? And no, tight, competetively ballanced games do not make universally usefull base for any possible game-based fun. This is a very popular myth on Dakka but very untrue one...

NCE is full of fixes to the unfun stuff. Not sure what you're on about. It's the only version I'll use, even if it's not perfect.

There is literally no sense to your argument. Like, at all.

Vorian wrote:
@nou, it's far easier to introduce random story elements to unbalance stuff as you see fit than for everyone to agree fixes to an unbalanced mess. If you're at that point and you don't care about the game being a true game but more of a story event with some rules then the fact you're altering balanced rules makes no difference.

That's true for isolated, one-off games. You can't have a balanced campaign. If you have a balanced campaign, you may as well play a series of one-off games instead.

The very idea of a campaign is that there is something to be gained by winning, and if some gangs rise to the top while others don't, you just can't have balanced games anymore. You can still have fair and fun games, though, if the disparity is kept reasonable.

Vorian wrote:
If, on the other hand, you are interested in watching your gang develop due to your own decisions - whilst also keeping it as a competitive game, then you require a solid ruleset. I want a campaign to develop naturally, not have it as a series of power level 9,000 super gangers unleashing their powers on each other or having to make stuff up outside the game to compensate.

Nowhere has it ever been written that Necromunda was intended to not be at its core, a fun game.

I'd argue Necromunda is right out of the box a solid ruleset and a fun game. Just not the most balanced one.

May I ask, what's not competitive about Necromunda? You don't get even match-ups. Is that your idea of "competitive"? That it's got to be even at all times or else it's an "unbalanced mess"?

I think competitive has crept in when it's not really what I'm talking about.

I want equipment costed correctly, rare trade that's actually worth taking, scenarios that aren't mostly luck dependant, skills tables that are mostly equal, no combinations which allow you to do stupid stuff like 48 charge ranges with a 2+ S test to make someone WS1

I would like the difference in gang strength to be 1:1.5 rather than 1:10

The game is most fun where everyone is a bit useless at the start, decisions matter, fun stuff happens. When I get to the point where M6 duel wielding hand flamers with Sprint and hip shooting are just waiting for stupid combinations to be unleashed on each other the campaign is pretty much done.

Vorian wrote:
I think competitive has crept in when it's not really what I'm talking about.

I want equipment costed correctly, rare trade that's actually worth taking, scenarios that aren't mostly luck dependant, skills tables that are mostly equal, no combinations which allow you to do stupid stuff like 48 charge ranges with a 2+ S test to make someone WS1

I would like the difference in gang strength to be 1:1.5 rather than 1:10

The game is most fun where everyone is a bit useless at the start, decisions matter, fun stuff happens. When I get to the point where M6 duel wielding hand flamers with Sprint and hip shooting are just waiting for stupid combinations to be unleashed on each other the campaign is pretty much done.

Thanks for the reply. I can agree with all of that. It's just this talk of competitive Necromunda that confuses me in this discussion.

Vorian wrote:
NCE is full of fixes to the unfun stuff. Not sure what you're on about. It's the only version I'll use, even if it's not perfect.

There is literally no sense to your argument. Like, at all.

"Stupid skills like marksman just need to not exist, BS 6 gangers with Infrared sights need not exist, charge ranges from one side of the board to another need not exist. The ambush scenario need not be decided on a few dice rolls at the start." - NCE still has all those things (and I don't know if your problem is with original or NCE Infra-red as those are vastly different) after a decade of community effort... I assume, that it is because they are not widely considered unfun.

And there is a lot of precise sense to my argument, it's simply not compatible with your mindset so you are having a hard time understanding what I'm saying... So let me rephrase it one last time, as we wandered from the topic of this thread for long enough - you seek ballance, competetiveness and as much skill-dependency in campaign progress as possible, as you seem to derive fun from measuring yourself against other players in a controlled environment. I derive fun from embracing the unexpected in a well defined but higly chaotic environment, as this tests (and trains) my rapid thinking abilities better. I can solve pretty much any ballanced game I encounter given enough time to analyse it and repetition to gain experience, so I actively seek those games which lack practical solvability, but are still skill-dependant. And to be crystal clear - there is a huuuuuge difference between practical unsolvability of a given game and it having no structure or definition (what you seem to believe is the only option when games aren't competetively ballanced). One of the fine examples of unsolvable but very well defined games is Bridge - the goal is to play every deal as optimal as possible, but you don't really test yourself against other players (outside of pre-designed deals on tournaments) or cannot solve random draw Bridge up-front and be certain that you'll win that evening or that this will be a "fair, ballanced evening when everybody will have equal opportunity to try and win a Grand Slam of Spades deal". Yet it is higly satisfying to know, that you can approach any hand and play it as optimal as it can be played because you're a great and skillfull Bridge player. To translate this onto Necromunda - I can accurately judge how optimal my game was no matter the odds at the start and I don't need to win to be happy about my performance if I did well.

Does my approach makes more sense to you now?

 ekwatts wrote:
Necromunda isn't meant to be played competitively. It doesn't need to be super-balanced.

I agree. I hate this weird desire to make things "balanced" and "competitive" - which are normally just ways to say "a terrible player will have an equal chance to win against a good player".

Nou - and your way of fun is possible with a balanced ruleset and mine isn't.

You lose nothing by having a balanced ruleset and I do when unbalanced things are left in.

Let's take the Lascannon as an example.

Let's say it costs 400 credits. Let's also say it's "worth" 200.

@ 400

You may take it and say it's fun, roleplay, a challenge against a harder gang.

For me, that Lascannon no longer exists in the game.

@ 200

You can handicap yourself 200 points and say it's fun, roleplay, a challenge against a harder gang. It essentially makes no difference to you. You have lost nothing by it being the court cost.

For me I now have the option to try a new build.


It's not like this is a weird concept, people enjoy building gangs - that's why yaktribe is full of threads asking about gang composition.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 judgedoug wrote:

 ekwatts wrote:
Necromunda isn't meant to be played competitively. It doesn't need to be super-balanced.

I agree. I hate this weird desire to make things "balanced" and "competitive" - which are normally just ways to say "a terrible player will have an equal chance to win against a good player".

That's nonsense. Highly luck dependant games mean terrible player will have an equal chance.

Poorly balanced games mean use the stupidly balanced stuff or die

Vorian wrote:
Nou - and your way of fun is possible with a balanced ruleset and mine isn't.

You lose nothing by having a balanced ruleset and I do when unbalanced things are left in.

Let's take the Lascannon as an example.

Let's say it costs 400 credits. Let's also say it's "worth" 200.

@ 400

You may take it and say it's fun, roleplay, a challenge against a harder gang.

For me, that Lascannon no longer exists in the game.

@ 200

You can handicap yourself 200 points and say it's fun, roleplay, a challenge against a harder gang. It essentially makes no difference to you. You have lost nothing by it being the court cost.

For me I now have the option to try a new build.


It's not like this is a weird concept, people enjoy building gangs - that's why yaktribe is full of threads asking about gang composition.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 judgedoug wrote:

 ekwatts wrote:
Necromunda isn't meant to be played competitively. It doesn't need to be super-balanced.

I agree. I hate this weird desire to make things "balanced" and "competitive" - which are normally just ways to say "a terrible player will have an equal chance to win against a good player".

That's nonsense. Highly luck dependant games mean terrible player will have an equal chance.

Poorly balanced games mean use the stupidly balanced stuff or die

Ok, since you jump from one "unballanced" example to another it is quite hard to follow what your exact point is... Lascannon cost isn't really unballanced and definately not in the same way skills/progress/campaign is. What both Autocannon and Lascannon are really doing in Necromunda is that their absolute overkill firepower give you board controll and ensure, that if you can hit the target it will be taken out of action (and under NCE have better odds of permanently kill a ganger). How much exactly is "nuclear deterrent" worth? And if your answer to this question is "not enough to justify 400pts" then your Necromunda is just smaller by one armoury entry. Not a big deal and definately doesn't scream "unballanced mess" to me...

As to your last point - Necromunda is both highly luck dependant (damage resolution and post battle sequence) and highly skill dependant (movement phase), with more emphasis on the latter. Terrible Necromunda player will statistically lose more often to a skilled player even when playing mirror gangs because movement, hiding, board controll and target priority matter a lot in this game. Unless you're playing on planet bowling ball of course... I agree, that by this virtue alone it could make for a great competetive ruleset if the rest of this system has been designed with ideal ballance in mind. But it is not the case of "only small fixes would be enough" but pretty much designing a completely different spin-off.

And I just tried to explain why "as ballanced as possible" systems strip me of my fun one post above, so I won't repeat myself. Just reread it again.

One last thing - I don't in any way claim, that your attitude or expectations from 'a' game aren't valid. Just that they aren't the only one possible. I have a bit of personal trigger about it and it just so happened that it focused on you in this particular thread. I don't have personal grudge with you or anything...

What the actual Lascannon is worth is immaterial (it's a huge waste but it was to just give an example).

By costing it correctly you cost the fluff players nothing and benefit those that actually want a fair game.


The point about luck was just that Judge was incorrect, balance in no way helps a terrible player compete with a good one. It's not really anything to do with the discussion.


You didn't explain anything. There is no disadvantage to a balanced ruleset, it doesn't matter if you play bridge or not.

And yes, people are claiming this view isn't valid. See every comment claiming that "Necromunda isn't meant to be balanced/competitive/etc" as if they are the arbiter of game ethos.

Sure, Necromunda should be a relaxed game, don't take it too seriously - but having all choices being viable isn't a bad thing

Vorian wrote:
What the actual Lascannon is worth is immaterial (it's a huge waste but it was to just give an example).

By costing it correctly you cost the fluff players nothing and benefit those that actually want a fair game.


The point about luck was just that Judge was incorrect, balance in no way helps a terrible player compete with a good one. It's not really anything to do with the discussion.


You didn't explain anything. There is no disadvantage to a balanced ruleset, it doesn't matter if you play bridge or not.

And yes, people are claiming this view isn't valid. See every comment claiming that "Necromunda isn't meant to be balanced/competitive/etc" as if they are the arbiter of game ethos.

Sure, Necromunda should be a relaxed game, don't take it too seriously - but having all choices being viable isn't a bad thing

Ok, at this point I think I said enough already and further discussion on my part won't add anything new for you to chew on. Cheers!

Well Shadow War was a GW 'prime' release, but if this is a specialist games release, it may have different rules?

I'm really looking forward to not being able to order my copy order on release day as it sells out in less than 7 minutes, then getting a barrage of rude comments (and people posting screenshots of how they got around the 'one per person' rule) because I dare voice my disappointment on GW facebook, and asking if they would be reprinting the game- especially as they had been advertising it for months as the 'next big thing'.

After all, it was so much fun with shadow war, I'm almost sure a new necromunda will follow the same trend!

Tony Cottrell said at Warhammer Fest that any new Necromunda probably wouldn't just be the same old rules.

 RexHavoc wrote:
I'm really looking forward to not being able to order my copy order on release day as it sells out in less than 7 minutes, then getting a barrage of rude comments (and people posting screenshots of how they got around the 'one per person' rule) because I dare voice my disappointment on GW facebook, and asking if they would be reprinting the game- especially as they had been advertising it for months as the 'next big thing'.

After all, it was so much fun with shadow war, I'm almost sure a new necromunda will follow the same trend!

To be fair, shadow wars was essentially a bundle for new scenery - Necromunda would be an ongoing game in the mould of BB.